It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
ALAN BENNETTOnce I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
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I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
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Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
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What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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The thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
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The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
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My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.
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Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.
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You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
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My experience came before most of you were born.
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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
ALAN BENNETT